New York, NY – 3 November 2016: Sperone Westwater is pleased to present new paintings by Susan Rothenberg for the artist’s eleventh solo show at the gallery since 1987 and her first show of new work in five years. This follows the gallery’s recent presentation of important vintage works by Rothenberg at Frieze Masters and showcases the artist’s continuing and vital contribution to contemporary painting.

In these new canvases, familiar subjects such as dogs and ravens inhabit ambiguous spaces defined by the artist’s well-known brushwork and a pronounced shift in vivid coloration. These subjects are both archetypal and, in some cases, specifically drawn from the artist’s surroundings—the artist’s beloved dog Bubbles makes an appearance. Rothenberg’s expressive mark, typically bridging figuration and abstraction, shifts across these works to evoke such disparate qualities as the silhouette of a dark bird at night, the flutter of gathered wings, and a luminous aquatic glow. Color plays a dominant and variable role in these new canvases, drawing from brilliant hues that can be found only in a marriage of Rothenberg’s fiction and everyday environment.

Red Bird (2014) depicts the fiery figure of a large bird, consuming the canvas in a contradiction of color—the creature is bold and powerful, though peacefully slumbers. Frenetic brush strokes create the illusion of a gentle motion, for although the scene appears silent and calm, Michael Auping has observed that “Rothenberg is seldom attracted to things that are still.” In Pink Raven (2012), a familiar choice of subject matter returns in an unusual color. Rothenberg paints a pale bird that clings to a metal rail, occupying the composition while the surrounding branches fade into the foggy depths. The mystique surrounding this extraordinary color and atmosphere is no stranger to Rothenberg: as Auping describes it, “Painting from memory is often more fiction than fact. The painter must reconcile two realities: an event as it is remembered, and the event that is the painting.”

Susan Rothenberg’s first solo show in 1975 took place at 112 Greene Street, a legendary alternative space in SoHo, and subsequently had numerous solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Important solo exhibitions include a retrospective organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery that traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum, The Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Seattle Art Museum, and the Dallas Museum of Art (1992-1994); a survey at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Monterrey, Mexico (1996-1997); “Susan Rothenberg: Paintings from the 90’s” at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1999); and an exhibition of drawings and prints at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University which traveled to the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu and the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe (1998-1999). A survey, “Moving in Place,” was organized by Michael Auping, Chief Curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and traveled to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe and the Miami Art Museum (2009-2011). Rothenberg’s work is in important public and private collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 1987, Rothenberg had her first solo exhibition at Sperone Westwater, where she exhibits regularly (1990, 1992, 1994, 1997, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2011, and 2016).

Susan Rothenberg is on view at Sperone Westwater from 4 November – 20 December 2016, opening on Friday, 4 November. For more information, please contact:

Outside In is an exhibition of five painters whose work explores the tensions between spaces. Andrea Belag does this with a reductive painterly vocabulary, where physical movements of color demarcate one space, and provide entry into another. Susanna Coffey makes portraits that verge on abstraction: melding her depiction of the person with his or her interior life, and a fictional landscape space. Elliott Green’s work is characterized by a feeling that disparate elements and means are combined into an unlikely, but synthesized, whole. Stephanie Pierce shows us, simultaneously, interior space, exterior space, and the in-between of reflections on the window. In Eleanor Ray’s paintings, depictions of doorways or framed views give us access to two worlds, with together feel like a dream-space.

Andrea Belag studied at Bard College, Boston University, and the New York Studio School, and has been a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, New York, since 1995. She is known for her abstractions where liquid, saturated color is applied with a broad, transparent stroke. She uses a variety of tools, including custom-made, wide brushes, rags, knifes, and spatulas. Recently, she has been painting on wood panels, and allowing the surface and grain of the wood to become an element in the work. A solo exhibition of her work was held at DCKT Contemporary in 2014. The title of her painting “Krushenick (After Hokusai)” is a testament to how diverse visual sources and suggestions of varied emotional states can inform one, very immediate, direct painting.

Susanna Coffey studied at Yale University and is the F.H. Sellers Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. She is known for her portraits and self-portraits, and also works across the genres of still-life and landscape. In recent work, she has utilized spray painting with stencils, to explore the ideas of masking, symmetry, mirroring, and abstract signifiers. “Late Snow” is densely worked, with a blue-white form, textured like snow-covered earth, but also suggesting a ghostlike, obscured head and face. She has been the subject of two solo exhibitions at SHFAP, in 2012 and 2014.

Elliott Green studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and lives in upstate New York. He was the G in Team ShaG, a collaborative art trio with Amy Sillman and David Humphrey. But even his solo work can feel like collaboration with himself: as biomorphic forms, knifed swaths of paint, and cartoony, graphite-drawn characters all converge in an Asian-feeling landscape space. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented by D’Amelio Terras and Postmasters Gallery. This is the first time the artist’s work is being shown at SHFAP.

Eleanor Ray studied at Amherst College and the New York Studio School. She is known for small paintings (often 4 x 6 inches or 5 x 7 inches) of places and spaces she has visited and photographed. The studio of the artist (hers and others – for example, Donald Judd and Cézanne), and the depiction of other art are subjects of ongoing investigation. Her precise, clear mark, and specificity of light, gives the paintings clarity and resonance that extends way beyond their literal size. At the same time, the painterly gesture and the way they are cropped makes them feel like portals into dreamscapes. In this exhibition, she includes paintings of a barn-studio she occupied during a residency in Montauk, Long Island; Iceland landscapes; and museum rooms with Mondrian paintings.

Stephanie Pierce was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and studied at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her paintings — of rooms, windows, textiles, and plants (outside and in) — are composed of a multitude of small marks and shards of color, each one distinct. It is a record of a devotional, patient form of looking, translated into a painterly process of responding, accruing, and removing. The resulting paintings feel like an almost magical synthesis of light, time, place, and surface – shimmering and in constant flux.

For further information or images, please contact the gallery at info@shfap.com or call 917.861.7312.

Storefront for Art and Architecture is closing its doors for good. The real estate vultures have descended to feed on the malnourished carcass of its signature Kenmare Street space. Its replacement will most likely be a Juice Press supplement administered through fiber-optic eyeliner. The official announcement is that it will be something called SAN SAN. A flagship store for BAMA Cosmetic Pharmaceuticals, OCTOPUS Entheobotanical Data Networks and Fata Morgana Entertainment Systems brought to you in a fancy new package designed by interior starchitect Henri Erkins. “A multiplatform consumer experience where virtual and tactile interaction merge in a new marketing sphere.” A kind of combination Pizza Hut-Taco Bell-Google daydream for the Lower Manhattan demographic. But before the polish of recycled paper, space rock, and smartphone flirtation bring about point-of-purchase orgasms, Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe have arranged for an interim scenario.

The overstock of Jungle Video, the now defunct media superstore you may remember from your drive to LAX via La Tijera Boulevard, is coming to Storefront for Art and Architecture for a fire sale of such gray market classics as Linguini is Not a Flower and Thank God For My Forties. A Canal Street-style kiosk of bootleg handbags and toxic perfume will stage a pop-up shop for all manner of DVD, VHS, Compact Disc, Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein, Prada, and perhaps a dime bag of heavily stepped on cocaine if you know the password. But this will only be the first stop on the path to the headlining act: a reprisal of the infamous Rat Fink Room.

The Rat Fink Room, the first dedicated stand-up comedy club on planet earth, opened in September 1963 on 50th St. and 3rd Ave. in New York City. Its proprietors, Morris Levy and Jackie Kannon, imagined an ad hoc gathering place where two-bit insult comics settled scores and “working blue” pushed the limits of good taste.

Jackie Kannon, its ringmeister, was a mobbed-up sycophant comic who felt pressured to buy himself a nose job in the hope of breaking out of the borscht belt. He was not even dimly aware of what might be at stake in the obscenity trials of the time, around such now-classic works as Howl and Naked Lunch. For him, “working blue” was about the money. Morris “The Octopus” Levy, the founder of Birdland and Roulette Records, was a mob connected music business executive who is mostly remembered as a crook who stole from recording artists, and was convicted of extortion and suspected of heroin distribution. Levy used the Rat Fink Room and his other venues as a place to surreptitiously record comedy acts and release records without the comics’ permission. He gave them no portion of the proceeds and threatened bodily harm if they sued. In the spirit of this, Freeman and Lowe have converted the neighbor’s bathroom (Staci, age 12, addicted to synthetic marijuana) into a surveillance headquarters that will keep audio/video recordings of the last days of Storefront.

The Rat Fink Room will be alive again in the twilight of Storefront for Art and Architecture through a series of nights programmed by Caroline Hirsch and the New York Comedy Festival from November 2nd to November 6th.

It is true that the New York City of the 20th century imagination is gone and never to return. But there will be a copy of New Jack City shot on a handycam in 1993 at Worldwide Cinemas on 50th St. and 8th Ave. available for purchase.

SPECIAL PREVIEW PERFORMANCES
“Paranoia Man In A Rat Fink Room” will open in tandem with the 13th annual New York Comedy Festival, which takes place the first week of November at venues throughout New York City.
On the evenings of November 2nd – 6th, Caroline Hirsch, founder and owner of the New York Comedy Festival and Carolines on Broadway, will curate comedic programming inside the installation, bringing to the space a functioning nightclub and entertainment venue complete with live stand-up performances.
The special preview performances are by invitation only. For more information, contact ratfinkroom@storefrontnews.org.

OPENING NIGHT
On Tuesday, November 8th, Storefront for Art and Architecture and the New York Comedy Festival will present the public opening of Paranoia Man in a Rat Fink Room, which coincides with the US presidential election.Guests will enter the Rat Fink Room, and will experience election-related programming and coverage throughout the evening.

ABOUT THE NEW YORK COMEDY FESTIVAL
Now in its thirteenth year, the New York Comedy Festival is produced by Carolines on Broadway in association with Comedy Central. The festival has featured the country’s top comedians, including Aziz Ansari, Judd Apatow, Hannibal Buress, Bill Burr, Louis C.K., Margaret Cho, Billy Crystal, Larry David, Ricky Gervais, Kathy Griffin, Kevin Hart, John Leguizamo, Norm Macdonald, Bill Maher, Tig Notaro, Nick Offerman, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, and Wanda Sykes, to name a few. In 2007, the festival launched the “Stand Up for Heroes” event to benefit The Bob Woodruff Foundation, which has featured performances by Ricky Gervais, John Mayer, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Conan O’Brien, Ray Romano, Jerry Seinfeld, Bruce Springsteen, Jon Stewart, and Robin Williams, among others. To date, the “Stand Up for Heroes” events have raised over $33 million. For more information please visit the NYCF website, like the NYCF Facebook page, and follow the NYCF on Twitter, @NYComedyFest. This year the festival has a new hashtag — #MakeNYLaugh — for use in all of its social media platforms.

ABOUT JONAH FREEMAN AND JUSTIN LOWE
Jonah Freeman was born in 1975 in Santa Fe, NM and lives and works in New York City. He holds a degree in Film Production and Dramatic Writing from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Since 1998, he has been exhibiting film/video, photo and environmental installations in galleries and museums worldwide. His several interconnected bodies of work primarily focus on the phantasmagoria of the constructed world. Recent solo exhibitions include In The Kaleidoscope Room, Mitterrand + Sanz, Zurich, Switzerland (2009); The Long Goodbye, John Connelly Presents, New York, NY (2007); The Franklin Abraham, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY (2005); and In the Public Realm: Sixteen Scenarios, Public Art Fund, Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn, NY (2002).

Freeman’s solo films have screened in several film festivals including The International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Locarno International Film Festival and The Rome International Film Festival. His work has also been represented in the recent group shows: Paper Exhibition, Artists Space, New York, NY (2009); The Future As Disruption, The Kitchen, New York, NY (2008); Le Centre pour l’Image Contemporaine, Saint Gervais, Geneva, Switzerland (2008); Grow Your Own, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2007); Busan Biennale 2006, Busan, South Korea (2006); Intouchable (l’ Idea transparence), Centre National d’Art Contemporain – Villa Arson, Nice, France (2006); Day Labor, PS1/MOMA, New York, NY (2005); Vanishing Point, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Wexner, OH (2005).

Support
Storefront’s programming is made possible through general support from Arup; DS+R; F.J. Sciame Construction Co., Inc.; Gaggenau; KPF; MADWORKSHOP; ODA; Roger Ferris + Partners; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; The Greenwich Collection Ltd.; the Lily Auchincloss Foundation; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Peter T. Joseph Foundation; and by Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the New York Comedy Festival.

Team Gallery is pleased to announce a solo show by Los Angeles-based artist James Crosby. Entitled Making It (James Crosby presents Garrett Morgan), the exhibition will run from 17 November through 23 December 2016. Team (gallery, inc.) is located at 83 Grand Street, between Greene and Wooster, on the ground floor. Concurrently, our Venice Beach space will house a solo show by Gardar Eide Einarsson.

In his debut solo show, James Crosby exhibits his multifarious, historically charged approach to the subject of blackness. While the works are superficially disparate – the artist works fluently with broadly varying materials – they are conceptually cohesive: each navigates the dichotomy of blackness and individuality, exploring the possibility of their mutual existence in American society. Crosby uses a variety of media – from figurative photography, to appropriative sculptural reproductions, to abstract metal works – to examine the cultural construction of race, to expose himself and deconstruct his own blackness and expectations regarding the blackness of others.

The show’s central figure is Garrett Morgan, an African-American inventor prominent in the early 20th century. In particular, the artist focuses on Morgan’s signature innovation: a protective respiratory hood, which allows its wearer to see and breathe in an atmospherically hostile environment, while also masking his identity. Significantly, the entrepreneur is also known for manufacturing so-called “assimilation products,” hair straightening formulas and skin bleaching creams, the purpose of which was to obscure and erase the physical signifiers associated with blackness. Crosby investigates the apparent contradiction of Morgan’s status: he was considered a civic leader in the black community, and famously created a public safety product, but also contributed actively to, and profited from, the commodification of racism. Rather than condemning Morgan, however, the artist finds a powerful affinity between the inventor’s assimilation products and breathing masks: both are instruments of survival, which camouflage their users’ personhood, but allow them to endure inimical, even deadly, environments.

Crosby’s hand-made reproductions of Morgan’s hoods hang off pegs on the gallery’s walls. The sculptural works are the artist’s own design, based on grainy archival photos and the artist’s intuition. The artworks are symbols of the original objects, three-dimensional realizations of flat images. The form is unearthed from history, alienated from its original functionality and isolated in a Fine Art context. In removing their utilitarian value, the artist turns the objects into emblems, the unlikely manifestations of the predicament of upwardly mobile black Americans, encouraged to hide the signs of their cultural and racial identity.

In a series of three photographs, Crosby himself appears in costume as Garrett Morgan, exhibiting the ambiguous and changing relationship between the maker and his object: he is shown holding and examining the mask, demonstrating its utility, and finally modeling it as a piece of couture. With these gestures, the artist explicates his identification with the inventor – both Crosby and Morgan are black makers, producers of culture, and have even constructed versions of the same respiratory hood, albeit for vastly different purposes – and explores the question of how a creator’s personhood might alter or reframe his creation. In particular, the works investigate the relationship between blackness and notions of autonomy, creativity and commodity, artistic or otherwise. In addition, they serve to staunchly controvert post-modern critiques of individualism, which, these pieces posit, cannot apply to people who have been historically denied their personhood.

Another body of work consists of deconstructed work suits and hooded sweatshirts, from which Crosby has removed the body panels, revealing their skeletal understructures. Hanging on white walls, these pieces formally incorporate their surrounding blankness, emphasizing their own emptiness, the structural absence of the implied individual. These works nod directly to David Hammons’ seminal 1993 sculpture In the Hood, which consists of an agape sweatshirt hood, hung high on a wall, recalling taxidermied hunting trophies, but also activate the contemporary symbolism of the hoodie, which, in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s execution, stands not merely for the African-American working class, but for the systematic murder of black men and, implicitly, therefore, the violent removal of black personhood.

The exhibition’s least representational works consist of gridded metal coated with tar, shaped to resemble the forms of both nets and cages. Forged from utilitarian wire, typically used as a means to constrict and tie down, these pieces originally stemmed from the artist’s refusal to represent the black body, which caused him to opt instead for a process-led, post-Minimal abstraction that would still allow him to engage obliquely with his typical subject matter – the strained, multitudinous relationship between the individual and his creation.

James Crosby graduated from UCLA’s Masters of Fine Arts program in May of 2016. This is his first solo exhibition.

Team (gallery, inc.) is pleased to announce a group show organized by Tom Brewer, with work by Zoe Barcza, Allison Branham, Brice Dellsperger, Jenny Holzer, Laura Hunt, Christian Jankowski, Hanna Liden, Alissa McKendrick, Sam Samore, Heji Shin and Georgia Wall. Entitled The Love Object, the exhibition will run from 12 January through 11 February 2017. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street in New York.
He said my name. He said ‘Martha', and once again I could feel it happening. My legs trembled under the big white cloth and my head became fuzzy, though I was not drunk. It's how I fall in love. He sat opposite. The love object. Elderly. Blue eyes. Khaki hair. The hair was greying on the outside and he had spread the outer grey ribs across the width of his head as if to disguise the khaki, the way some men disguise a patch of baldness. -Edna O'Brien, from her short story “The Love Object.”
We often meet sentimentality, both in ourselves and in others, with a degree of embarrassment; emotionality and seriousness are frequently considered not only discrete, but mutually exclusive conditions. Emotions are, by their definition, subjective and immeasurable, and therefore fundamentally unscientific. Love, in particular, is often described as an intoxicant, an obscuring fog that distorts our perception of reality, rather than a truth unto itself. Contradicting this characterization, Yvonne Rainer titled her autobiography after an apothegm spoken by her psychotherapist: Feelings Are Facts. In the book, the dancer and filmmaker chronicles the history of her internal life, reproducing and referring to personal ephemera and diary entries as primary source documents. Her romances often take center stage: she details her relationship with the artist Robert Morris, and her deeply suicidal state following its dissolution. Love, for all its ephemerality and whimsy, is frequently a matter of literal life and death.
Roland Barthes’ A Lover's Discourse: Fragments provides this show with its loose organizing principle: the application of structuralism and semantic thought to this thing that is subjective but universal, capricious but grave, meaningless but all-important: love. In his introduction to the English translation of the text, Wayne Koestenbaum describes the book as “an attempt to get rid of ‘love’ - its roles, its attitudes - in order to find the luster that remains when the stereotypes have been sent packing.” Paradoxically, Barthes' lover relies on a thesaurus-like repertoire - of imagery, vocabulary and narratives, all necessarily external to himself - to define and organize the nebulous, amorous feeling. Likewise, this exhibition's participating artists use references, both visual and linguistic, to various other media (often music, film and literature) to chip away at the cultural veneer that those same words and pictures constitute, and, perhaps, whiff the perfume left by love, once its signifiers are obscured.
Central to Barthes' book is the construction of a dichotomy: he establishes the lover (“the amorous subject”) and the loved (“the loved object”) as necessarily separate entities, and love itself as moving in a single direction - from the nuanced, multiplicitous and thoroughly unfixed self, to the static other. The former aestheticizes the latter, perceiving him as a singular, seamless whole. This exhibition partially embraces the distinction, its artists examining and manifesting the contrasting perspectives of active and passive love, but also reveling in the murky, delirious expanse between the two.
These artists do not seek to define love. Instead, the works on view, both individually and as a collective, explore love's protean character - its frequently antithetical incarnations, which undulate from sexual lust to agamic admiration, familiar tenderness to remote worship, pleasure to pain. The word, “love,” is a porous vessel, not a cosmic universal truth but an organically conceived, non-rigid construct, encapsulating any combination of commonplace feelings including intimacy, empathy, desire and obsession. Its elasticity allows it to describe and define differing relationships: consider the fundamental discrepancies between the romantic and familial feelings that go by the name of “love.” In spite of their widely divergent practices, the participating artists are unified not only by the shared subject matter of love, but also a disavowal of sleekness and austerity, both verbal and pictorial; the artworks are uninhibited by the pursuit of chic or gloss, instead embracing forthright expressive vocabularies and familiarly rough-hewn, DIY aesthetics.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs please call 212.279.9219.

In the Orphic cosmogony, history began when the Greek god Chronos begot Aether (Light) and
Chaos. Chronos planted a silvery egg in the divine Aether and from within sprung Hydros and
the first generation of gods. They called their world the Kosmos, a term the ancient Greeks
extended to praise any exquisitely ordered, harmonious object, bearing the qualities of
elegance and grace.

The artists presented in Cosmic Connections are united by this singular quality – the essential
grace that connects one with the universe in a strange, intense light. Descartes describes this
elemental virtue as that of the Muses, derived from the Greek verb that signifies to “Explore
with Desire”, going so far as to declare that desire “opens the difficult Locke of all Arts and
Sciences”. In these “cosmic” artists is manifest an Axis Mundi, a funnel, a tunnel, a ladder or
tree, a line traced - like dragon veins running down from the sky into the mountains and along
the earth -, that bridges the misty penumbra between actuality, fantasy and future.

In the 13th century, Saint Thomas Aquinas too sought to define this quality between time and
eternity. Aquinas wished to revive the aevum, the time of the angels. In Cosmic Connections
there is a profound alchemy, a superconscious creation, in the works of the artists presented.
This alchemy unites physical and immaterial domains, treating these not as divorced, but rather
soul mates or kindred spirits, friends that shape each others’ rhythms, colors and forms. These
artists are heirs to ancient signals. They tell the epic tale of our veiled immortality, the paradox of
humanity’s bizarre power anchored in our vulnerability. They evoke the aevum, suspending us
between eternity and the now, erasing time and reminding us of our mortality all at once.

New York, NY  WESTWOOD GALLERY NYC presents a premiere gallery exhibition of 49 original drawings by Andy Warhol. The free form ink drawings from 1955 to 1967 are a reflection of Warhol’s fascination with the performing arts during his rise from commercial artist to the launch of his fame as a global Pop artist.

Andy Warhol arrived in New York City in 1949 at the age of 21 after graduating from Carnegie Institute of Technology. While at Carnegie he developed interests in dance and performing arts and enrolled in a modern dance class where he was the only male student. In New York City the 1950’s were a golden post-war era of magazines, advertising and consumerism. Warhol was one of the most successful commercial artists, creating sought-after drawing illustrations for shoes, flowers and happy promotional images. Although he yearned to be in the circle of fine art artists in New York and focus on experimentation with various art media, he began to meet people of interest in the cultural milieu in Manhattan. Warhol attended performing arts, theater, ballet, concerts and counterculture events.

Warhol met Lydia Joel in the early 1950's at a dance concert, she was Editor-in-Chief of Dance magazine from 1952-69. Lydia Joel was later portrayed by Debbie Allen in the movie Fame (Lydia was also the head of the dance department at the School of Performing Arts, 1973-84). Associate editor Doris Hering answered the door upon Warhol's first visit in 1951 and saw a person she described as “a pathetic little thing.”

Through 1967 Warhol called upon Lydia, meeting her at the magazine office, to converse on contemporary dance and performance. He gifted a drawing to her at most of their meetings as a token of appreciation for her commitment to the arts. After viewing Warhol's artwork, Lydia selected or requested several drawings for Dance magazine, such as a cover portrait of a ballerina en pointe in 1958 and another cover of the late dancer, Doris Humphrey in 1959. In June 2007, Dance Magazine reprinted some of the Warhol drawings in an article to celebrate their 80th year in publication. Lydia Joel died in 1992 and a private collector acquired the entire collection of her Warhol drawings.

The 49 original ink drawings are curated into groups, including performing ballerinas, an array of dancing figures clothed in half white and half black, acrobats and circus performers, famous destinations such as Covent Garden and the Eiffel Tower, as well as a series based on a sketched character with only a head and arms in various mundane poses. This child-like character repeats itself in a collective of images with gears, cogs and wires, appearing lost in a progression of moving parts. Within the collection of 49 drawings, Warhol's direction changes over the years, from whimsical to perplexing. These unaffected and introspective drawings are a reflection of Warhol's experiences during his formative years and provide a view into the artist's cryptic visual language. Warhol quote: “I never wanted to be a painter; I wanted to be a tap dancer”

The 2016-2017 season of the Center for Italian Modern Art presents an exhibition featuring Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) and Giulio Paolini (b.1940). The presentation explores the relationship between Paolini, one of Italy's greatest conceptual artists and Italian modern master, de Chirico, shedding new light on the key inspirational role de Chirico played not only in the development of Surrealism but also in the emergence of Conceptual art.
By presenting the two artists in direct dialogue for the first time, the exhibition explores the themes of the enigma, self-portrait and classical antiquity, and presents over 40 works of historical and contemporary nature including site-specific works spanning a broad spectrum of mediums.

Cecily Brown: Rehearsal is the artist’s first solo museum show in New York and the first exhibition dedicated to her drawings. Arranged thematically, the more than eighty small drawings, large-scale works, and sketchbooks on view will foreground Brown’s iterative reworking of motifs from her wide-reaching arsenal of source material—prints by eighteenth-century draftsman William Hogarth, pages from animal encyclopedias, and Jimi Hendrix’s 1968 album cover for Electric Ladyland are just some of the images that Brown has rendered again and again in her own hand. Best known for her canvases that revel in the visceral immediacy of paint, her drawings are more open in their appearance, offering fragmentary motifs that build upon and undo each other in an endlessly renewed quest. They embody a unique aesthetic approach while simultaneously bringing attention to the investigatory impulse that grounds Brown’s art in general. Painstaking and obsessive in their efforts to capture an entire scene or the slightest of gestures—a turn of a lion’s head here, the edge of a Bruegel painting there—Brown’s drawings take the act of looking as their very subject.

Olga Chernysheva’s investigations of Russia’s post-Soviet political and social atmosphere depict a side of Russia that is rarely seen. Her charcoal drawings provide the viewer with an arrestingly intimate view of her subjects – security guards, commuters, shoppers, the homeless, and other anonymous citizens. Though she has been depicting the urban landscape for decades, she has rarely strayed from portraits of her home country. For the Drawing Center exhibition, Chernysheva spent a month in New York, a city in which she had spent time but never resided, creating an idiosyncratic travelogue of drawings and accompanying texts, exploring the notion of dislocation in relation to both language and image.

As part of its on-going stairwell project, The Drawing Center has commissioned American artist Gary Simmons to create a site-specific wall drawing in the lobby stairwell. Simmons’s installation will be the second in the series following Abdelkader Benchamma’s Representation of Dark Matter (April 2015 – August 2016).

Mining the iconography of American popular culture, Gary Simmons’s work addresses personal and collective experiences of race and class. He is best known for his “erasure drawings,” which he began while working in an abandoned school that contained an abundance of blackboards. Using white chalk on slate-painted panels or walls, Simmons blurs the drawings with his hands resulting in hazy but persistent images that evoke faded memories or classrooms at the end of the school day. For The Drawing Center, Simmons will create a text-based work consisting of names of African-American actors and actresses from the early days of silent film. The artist describes the installation whose scroll-like format recalls movie “credit-crawls” frozen in mid-motion, as invoking “the memories of actors that have been blurred in the history of Hollywood film…. [The piece depicts] a kind of silence in both voice and visibility.”

The Open Sessions program was created by Lisa Sigal and Nova Benway, Open Sessions Curators, as an opportunity for selected artists to find new approaches for contextualizing and exhibiting their work, through exhibitions, public programs, and conversation. The artists selected for Open Sessions may or may not draw as their primary means of art-making. The two-year program engages musicians, architects, dancers, poets—anyone who is interested in expanding the boundaries of drawing. Open Sessions fosters a dynamic, ever-evolving conversation with new drawing practices and practitioners, viewing drawing as an activity rather than a product.

Public, Private, Secret is the premiere exhibition at the new ICP Museum, located at 250 Bowery. Organized by Curator-in-Residence, Charlotte Cotton, with ICP Associate Curator Pauline Vermare and Assistant Curator Marina Chao, the debut show and events program explore the concept of privacy in today’s society and studies how contemporary self-identity is tied to public visibility.

This thought-provoking exhibition presents a wide range of historical and contemporary works by artists including Zach Blas, Martine Syms, Natalie Bookchin, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and Andy Warhol. Streams of real-time images and videos from various social media sources — curated with Mark Ghuneim and ICP’s New Media Narratives students — sharpen and heighten attention towards the social implications of our image-centric world.

ICP Curator-in-Residence Charlotte Cotton says, “Public, Private, Secret’s non-hierarchical organization allows for dialogue between and about the diversity of photographic and visual culture in a wholly unique and unexpected way.”

The exhibition creates a physical experience through which to examine photography’s role in breaking and resetting the boundaries of social and personal privacy.

Del Mar revels in her fascination and obsession with Feral Women: a riveting and immersive exhibition of photo portraits, filmed portraits, black velvet paintings and drawings. “Women expressing wildness, sometimes overt, sometimes subtle, is a manifestation of innate power. The high hard femme, the bad girl, the rocker, the biker, the surfer-selkie, are icons of a new feminist pantheon.” The implied mirror or screen, a disrupted transmissive surface for exploring known and newly discovered selves via butch selfie drawings and filmed portraits, challenge accepted norms of representation.

National Museum of the American Indian in New York to Inaugurate a Permanent, Hemispheric Survey of Native American Art

Media Only
Joshua A. Stevens
(212) 514-3823
stevensja@si.edu

A spectacular, permanent exhibition of almost 700 works of Native art from throughout North, Central and South America is now open at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York, the George Gustav Heye Center. Organized by geographic regions, “Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian” demonstrates the breadth of the museum’s renowned collection and highlights the historic importance of many of these iconic objects.
Five years in the making, “Infinity of Nations” establishes the museum as an educational cornerstone for the city, providing an expansive overview of Native America. The exhibition is providing the foundation for eight seasons of public programs, each celebrating a different region and revealing the richness and diversity of indigenous nations.

Chosen to illustrate the geographic and chronological scope of the museum’s collections, the objects have been meticulously conserved and are displayed in custom casework, some as large as 40 feet wide and 12 feet high, creating striking panoramas throughout the exhibition.

“Infinity of Nations” opens with a display of headdresses, signifying the sovereignty of Native nations, including a magnificent Kayapó krok-krok-ti, a macaw-and-heron-feather ceremonial headdress. Focal-point objects, representing each region, include an Apsáalooke (Crow) robe illustrated with warriors’ exploits; a detailed Mayan limestone bas relief depicting a ball player; an elaborately beaded Inuit tuilli, or woman’s inner parka, made for the mother of a newborn baby; a Mapuche kultrung, or hand drum, that depicts the cosmos; a carved and painted chief’s headdress depicting a killer whale with a raven emerging from its back, created and worn by Willie Seaweed (Kwakwaka’wakw); an anthropomorphic Shipibo joni chomo, or water vessel from Peru; a Chumash basket decorated with a Spanish-coin motif; an ancient mortar from Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, N.M.; a gourd carved with a detailed picture of the Battle of Arica by Mariano Flores Kananga (Quechua); and an early Anishinaabe man’s outfit complete with headdress, leggings, shirt, sash and jewelry. The exhibition concludes with works by Native artists such as Allan Houser (Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache) and Rick Bartow (Mad River Wiyot).

“Long before European contact, Native America was interconnected and culturally active,” said Kevin Gover (Pawnee/Comanche), director of the National Museum of the American Indian. “This exhibition will demonstrate how, throughout time, the visual arts were an important communication tool of this ongoing vitality.”

“Visitors will experience the diversity of Native America through some of the most historically significant and greatest artistic masterpieces of the collection,” said John Haworth (Cherokee), director of the Heye Center. “This will be a new moment for us to inspire and serve New York City residents, tourists and school groups.”

“Infinity of Nations” was organized by Cécile R. Ganteaume, museum associate curator. A major publication, edited by Ganteaume, has been co-published with HarperCollins. The invaluable contributions of Native historians and numerous community members provided new perspectives and historical information for the exhibition and the book.

“Infinity of Nations” has received leadership support from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the City of New York, with support from the Office of the Mayor and the New York City Council through the Department of Cultural Affairs. It has received federal support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center and the Smithsonian School Programming Fund. Public support has also been provided by the New York State Council on the Arts.

Leadership foundation support is provided by the Leon Levy Foundation and Henry Luce Foundation. Support is also provided by the Booth Ferris Foundation, an anonymous donation administered by the Carnegie Corp., Valerie and Jack Rowe and the Rowe Family Foundation, Barbara and James Block and the American Express Foundation.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York, the George Gustav Heye Center, is located at One Bowling Green in New York City, across from Battery Park. The museum is free and open every day (except Dec. 25) from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Thursdays until 8 p.m. For information, call (212) 514-3700 or visit www.americanindian.si.edu.

An exhibition featuring Native dance as a vibrant, meaningful and diverse form of cultural expression is presented in “Circle of Dance,” opening Saturday, Oct. 6, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York, George Gustav Heye Center. This five-year exhibition, which features 10 social and ceremonial dances from throughout the Americas, will be on view at the museum through Oct. 8, 2017.

For well over 50 years in the United States and Canada—and for centuries in Latin America—church and “civilization” regulations discouraged and even outlawed many indigenous dances. Not until the second half of the 20th century were such prohibitions fully reversed. Today, in the second decade of the 21st century, many Native communities continue to preserve their traditions involving dance.

“Circle of Dance” will interpret the traditions of social, ceremonial and spiritual dances highlighting the significance of each dance and the unique characteristics of its movements and music. Each dance will be showcased by a single mannequin dressed in appropriate regalia and posed in a distinctive dance position. An accompanying media piece will complement and enhance the mannequin displays. Presenting the range of dances featured in the exhibition this high-definition video will capture the variety of the different Native dance movement vocabularies, and the music that is integral to their performance.

“These diverse social, ceremonial and spiritual dances are essential in maintaining the spiritual, physical and emotional well-being of tribal communities,” said Kevin Gover (Pawnee/Comanche), director of the National Museum of the American Indian. “This exhibition will demonstrate what an important tool dance is to the expression and vitality of Native peoples.”

The featured dances include the Yoreme Pajko’ora dance from the southern Sonora and northern Sinaloa states in Mexico in which the dancer wears strings of pebble-filled, dried giant silk moth-cocoon rattles covering their legs from their ankles to knees. Pajko’ora dancing is an important part of Yoreme/Catholic celebrations. The Hopi Butterfly Dance is danced in pairs by young people in northern Arizona to give thanks for the Hopi way of life. A girl’s or young woman’s ceremonial dress for the Butterfly Dance is composed of a traditional Hopi dress (a piece of woven black cloth fastened over the right shoulder, leaving the left shoulder bare and reaching to the knees); a woven belt, often dyed black, red and green; a brightly colored, lace-trimmed, cotton shawl; and anklets. The most striking components of a girl’s outfit, however, are her headdress, called a kopatsoki, and black hair bangs, which cover her eyes. The Tlingit ku.éex', led by clan leaders along the Pacific Northwest Coast, dance wearing a headdress called a shakee.át. Eagle down, a sign of peace, is placed in the crown, and as the leader dances the eagle down spreads in the air and gently falls to the floor, blessing the ceremonial space.

“This exhibition shows the diversity and splendor of music and dance of Native people from across the western hemisphere,” said John Haworth (Cherokee), New York director of the National Museum of the American Indian. “We are so proud to premiere this exhibition here in New York City.”

“Circle of Dance” was organized by Cécile R. Ganteaume, the museum’s associate curator. The invaluable contributions of Native historians and numerous community members provided new perspectives and historical information for the exhibition.

“Circle of Dance” has received leadership support from Margot and John Ernst and Valerie and Jack Rowe. The museum also wishes to thank Richard Hetzler, executive chef of the Mitsitam Native Foods Café. The exhibition has received funding from the Latino Initiatives Pool administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York, the George Gustav Heye Center, is located at One Bowling Green in New York City, across from Battery Park. The museum is free and open every day (except Dec. 25) from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Thursdays until 8 p.m. For information, call (212) 514-3700 or visit www.americanindian.si.edu.

Working at the intersection of theater, visual arts, and critical practice, the collective My Barbarian (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade) uses performance to theatricalize past and present problems and imagine ways of being together. The group’s New Museum exhibition and residency, “The Audience is Always Right,” are organized as part of the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s R&D Season: DEMOCRACY.

Cheng Ran (b. 1981, Inner Mongolia, China) is one of the most promising Chinese artists of his generation. Since 2005, Cheng has been producing film and video works that draw widely from both Western and Chinese literature, poetry, cinema, and visual culture, fabricating new narratives that combine myths and historical events. “Cheng Ran: Diary of a Madman” marks the culmination of his three-month residency at the New Museum, initiated in partnership with K11 Art Foundation.

The exhibition borrows its title from what is widely considered China’s first modern short story, written by Lu Xun in 1918. Just as Lu Xun’s story comprises first-person narratives of a character at the margins of society who gradually turns mad, Cheng’s fifteen new videos take the form of diaristic vignettes that reveal a larger assessment of a foreign place through the eyes of an outsider. As a first-time visitor to the United States, Cheng approaches New York already familiar with iconic and cinematic images of the city, simultaneously intending to find and capture what is typically excluded from such views.

Cheng’s earliest works, shot entirely in the confines of his apartment, attempted to make compelling the ordinary and unspectacular aspects of his immediate environment. Inspired by filmmakers such as Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, and Béla Tarr, Cheng’s subsequent films and videos often registered his curiosity as he observed the overlooked and incongruous aspects of everyday life and chronicled his interactions with remote and historic sites. His new multi-video work, Diary of a Madman (2016), includes imagery from his early morning explorations of New York City streets, a trip to the Staten Island Bay, and a visit to an abandoned psychiatric hospital on Long Island, exposing his sense of estrangement amid his encounters with uncelebrated and obscure facets of the city.

Embracing a long lineage of experimental cinema, Cheng’s new work follows the making of his nine-hour epic In Course of the Miraculous (2015), which imagines the stories behind three real-life mysterious disappearances. These include British mountaineer George Mallory, who went missing while ascending Mount Everest in 1924; artist Bas Jan Ader, who vanished during his 1975 journey across the Atlantic as part of a performance titled In Search of the Miraculous; and the Chinese fishing trawler Lu Rong Yu no. 2682, which in 2011 returned to land after eight months with only one-third of its original crew still alive. With a narrative inspired by fables and mythic literature, Cheng reinterprets the title of Ader’s final work, and in doing so, reflects on his paradoxical pursuit of the inexplicable or unimaginable parts of history. In Course of the Miraculous will be screened on select days in the New Museum Theater.

Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection offers new perspectives on one of art’s oldest genres. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s holdings, the more than one hundred works on view here reveal how artists have reinvented portraiture during the last sixty years. Bringing iconic works together with lesser-known examples and recent acquisitions in a range of mediums, the exhibition unfolds in five thematic sections on this floor, with additional sections opening on the seventh floor later this month. Some of these groupings concentrate on focused periods of time, while others span more broadly to forge links between the past and the present. This sense of connection is one of portraiture’s most important aims, whether memorializing famous individuals long gone or calling to mind loved ones near at hand.

Portraits are one of the richest veins of the Whitney’s collection, a result of the Museum’s longstanding commitment to the figurative tradition, which was championed by its founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Yet the works included in this exhibition propose diverse and often unconventional ways of representing an individual. Many artists reconsider the pursuit of external likeness—portraiture’s usual objective—within formal or conceptual explorations or reject it altogether. Some revel in the genre’s glamorous allure, while others critique its elitist associations and instead call attention to the banal or even the grotesque.

Once a rarefied luxury good, portraits are now ubiquitous. Readily reproducible and ever-more accessible, photography has played a particularly vital role in the democratization of portraiture. Most recently, the proliferation of smartphones and the rise of social media have unleashed an unprecedented stream of portraits in the form of snapshots and selfies. Many contemporary artists confront this situation, stressing the fluidity of identity in a world where technology and the mass media are omnipresent. Through their varied takes on the portrait, the artists represented in Human Interest raise provocative questions about who we are and how we perceive and commemorate others.

A second part of the exhibition, including works from the first half of the twentieth century, will open on the seventh floor on April 27.

Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight features more than fifty works, including paintings, three-dimensional works, and works on paper. Comprised of three sections, organized in rough chronological sequence, the first section features earlier works from the formative period, 1948–1958, during which Herrera experimented with different modes of abstraction before establishing the visual language that she would explore with great nuance for the succeeding five decades. Featuring more than a dozen paintings made while Herrera lived in Paris (1948–1953) in the years following World War II, many of these works have never been displayed before in a museum. It was during this period that Herrera developed her distinctive style of geometric abstraction, moving towards cleaner lines and a reduced palette.

An unprecedented gathering of works from what Herrera considers her most important series, Blanco y Verde, comprise the second section and this room will serve as the centerpiece of the exhibition. The nine paintings from the series, spanning the years 1959–1971, illustrate the groundbreaking ways in which Herrera conceptualized her paintings as objects, using the physical structure of the canvas as a compositional tool and integrating the surrounding environment. These Blanco y Verde works will be isolated in their own gallery, illuminating the various compositional twists and inflections of the dichromatic works and creating a dynamic interplay of visual correspondences.

The final section will feature work dating from approximately 1962–1978, illuminating Herrera's continued experimentation with figure/ground relationships. Also included in this section are four sculptural works, which Herrera refers to as “estructuras.” These wooden works, alongside several drawings from the 1960s, will illustrate the crucial architectural aspect of her vision and the way in which many of Herrera's paintings begin with a three-dimensional concept. The latest works in this section will be seven vivid paintings that comprise her brilliant Days of the Week series from 1975–78.

Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight is organized by Dana Miller, former Richard DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition will also be on view at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, from February 4 through April 16, 2017.

Virginia Overton (b. 1971; Nashville) creates exhibitions in response to the natural and man-made environments in which she works, often overlaying these sites with diverse references ranging from the history of modern art to her upbringing in rural Tennessee. Winter Garden expands on her installation on this terrace last summer, which explored the concept of the sculpture garden through a system of prefabricated windmills that pumped air through crisscrossing tubes into metal tanks filled with thriving aquatic plants.

Overton often recycles materials that she has scavenged or repurposes elements from her previous works. To prepare for the winter season, she emptied and overturned the tanks to protect them from ice and debris. These drums now act as dry housings and amplifiers for the sound of air being pumped rhythmically through the tubing across the terrace toward hidden microphones. By activating these materials in a new way, Overton has reimagined the sculpture garden as a sonic environment rather than a botanic one.

“Looking at Mars, this imagined space reflects most humans back to Earth.”
—MPA

Since relocating to California's Mojave desert in 2013, artist MPA (b. 1980; Redding, CA) has been immersed in a broad inquiry into the potential colonization of Mars, often known as the red planet. In this multi-part exhibition the artist looks at Mars as a place for settlement and a resource for our own planet, as well as a site of possible human origin. MPA’s research considers unconventional sources such as mythology, psychic accounts, and personal narratives, as credible authorities. By reflecting more generally on histories of colonization, RED IN VIEW raises questions of militarism and patriarchy, prompting us to examine our own, often subconscious, colonizing behaviors.

RED IN VIEW unfolds in four movements throughout the museum. The exhibition begins in the lobby gallery and extends to the theater in February for a culminating performance. Over the course of ten continuous days, MPA and artists Malin Arnell and Amapola Prada perform Orbit, living in the narrow space between the windowpanes of the theater. The space becomes a biosphere: an enclosed, self-sustaining habitat, modeled after an environment where the first settlers on Mars might reside.